Today I had a job interview in which I was asked "If you were the leader of a team of four, and you wanted to do something one way but everyone else wanted to do it the other way, and neither party has any hope of convincing the other party, what do you do?" I answered that I would have to do what I felt was best for the company and go in the direction I felt was the correct path. This question continued to nag me for the rest of the day. What if the employer was looking for a team player? Would they dislike someone who would use their authority to overrule an entire team?

The way that I had thought about it was that as the team leader, I am (hopefully) more qualified to make such decisions, but more importantly, I have a responsibility to the company. A leader isn't someone who does something just because everyone else thinks it's right; that's what followers do. And even if a lot of people think one course of action is right, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is.

In any case, I tried to think of an example to illustrate my point, and this is what I came up with. Imagine that you are Jorge Boosh, President of the company AmeriCo. You have a client that produces a very popular mp3 player called the I-Rock. There is a rumor that a hacker called Sad Adam Who's Sane has a bug called the WMD that may be hidden in the I-Rock and could potentially cause harm to its users, many of which are employees of AmeriCo. Your board of advisers urges you to launch a large scale operation to obliterate all traces of WMD from I-Rocks. However, you feel that such an operation is unfounded, as there is little to no evidence that WMD is in I-Rocks and that it would cost AmeriCo a vast amount of resources and make you very unpopular with employees. Your board will not budge on their opinion, but you can make the ultimate decision. What do you do if you are President Jorge?